Wednesday, 29 August 2012

KP, FEEDING FRENZIES, AND THE DISINGENUOUSNESS OF THE SCRIBES

It is too much to call it
a witch hunt. It has certainly been a saga. But it is nonetheless easy to get
carried away with things, to see Kevin Pietersen’s often gauche behaviour, his effulgent narcissism
and crashing lack of social judgement as corroborating ‘evidence’ of some profound treacherousness when it was probably alllittle more than ill-judged sounding off from a player who
is – yes – full of himself and needy and, frankly, not one of the lads, and so just
as complicit in his own marginalization from Team England as the parody Twitter
account that Stuart Broad had nothing to do with.

Over the last three weeks, Pietersen
has provided the cricket writing press with what is often called a feeding frenzy, in which, in the words of media
theorist Steven Johnson, “coverage of a story begets more coverage, leading to
a kind of hall-of-mirrors environment where small incidents get amplified into
Major Events”. Scribes with perhaps little personal agenda against the batsman
(although it is fair to say that not many have warmed to him) have all weighed
in. Salient among these was the ludicrously boorish radio interview of Michael
Henderson – with his grandiloquent Mancunian intonation, a sort of reactionary
version of Anthony H Wilson, and a man who, in the process of dismissing “riff-raff”
supporters on 5Live and not-quite-namedropping “six England captains” apparently
unanimous in their hardline views about Pietersen’s fate, seemed genuinely unaware of
the irony in his long, rasped checklist of KP’s flaws.

Aside from the
preposterous Henderson,
there are journalists – would-be kingmakers, many – with little real idea about
which way the ever-changing situation between the ECB, Strauss (now Cook) and
Flower will tip yet who nevertheless find themselves writing things like “there can be little prospect of
Pietersen ever playing international cricket again”. Maybe, maybe not. They
speak of “the latest damaging revelations”.
Maybe, maybe not. The assurance of the language is indicative only of the
newspaper’s sense of its own influence.

Anyway, on Monday my eye
was turned by a brief exchange – one that seemed particularly illustrative of a
blindspot among pressmen (well, a blindspot or species of speciousness) – that
took place on Twitter between @countycricketkj and @newman_cricket (the latter
being Paul Newman, cricket correspondent of the Daily Mail), an exchange in which the former, unwittingly, is cast
as disgruntled naïf, the latter, as venerable hack. Also present is the trope
of the impersonal, supra-personal media machine rumbling along, propelled by its editorial
strictures and the friendly one-upmanship of professional rivals seeking scoops;
look more closely, however, and beneath this dreary inevitability – that's just the way things are –we cannot avoid seeing the individual decisions (albeit circumscribed, limited) of conscious actors. The exchange:

KJ: “Whoever is leaking
the KP stuff is forgetting that team unity involves all 11 players – not just
10”.

[I should say here that I
have omitted a tweet from before Newman’s second reply. We’ll get to that just
now.]

What formed the background
to all this was an
apparently factual yet still insidiously scurrilous article by Newman that sought
to muck-rake regarding some snub of Pietersen’s to James Taylor on day three at
Headingley, first by walking off at tea with the South Africans (no mention of
him giving Taylor a pat on the back as the latter left the field when dismissed)
and then later in the dressing room. True? Yes. Over-inflated tittle-tattle
characteristic of a feeding frenzy? Absolutely.

The article then makes an
incredibly glib elision between KP’s absence from the ODI squad and Chris Woakes’
new boy, straight-bat observations about the atmosphere in the dressing room. To
wit: “As it emerged that Pietersen swapped angry words with a senior player,
after criticising debutant James Taylor and boasting of his own importance to
England during his brilliant 149 at Leeds, another newcomer to the dressing
room described the atmosphere within it now as ‘fantastic’.” Now. Not … not when? Or is it just to confirm
that he was talking about the day of his arrival, and not the day of his non-arrival? And that “as it emerged”,
too, making sure you get the connection, is pretty craven. An everyday, conventional sort of craven, mind.

Of course, everyone of
sound mind who has managed to suffocate their inner fascist knows that the Mail is exactly the sort of institution
that systematically preys on its readers’ basest emotions, a Leviathan that
indulges in the most cynical, moralisingly middlebrow shit-stirring-for-profit. It is an
editorial tone that happens to shore up, and foment, the prejudices of those
who like their ivories (not ebonies) tinkled with that sort of misanthropic
melody (Middle Englanders who would wet themselves if they had to deal with the
world outside of their soft-furnished social codes), all the better to sell the
same curtain-twitching drek the next day, and the next, and the next... You would hope that its
sports writers might avoid their domain’s equivalent of knicker-sniffing. Not that
Newman is by any means the only one guilty of it. Derek
Pringle wrote a day earlier in The
Telegraph: “According to some, there has been animosity brewing between
[Pietersen and Strauss] for a while now and the pair were seen having a heated argument” at a PCA
golf day. According to some.

not part of the story

The feeding frenzy,
hall-of-mirrors element can be glimpsed in the fact that, to all intents and
purposes, any dressing room slight toward Taylor – and Pringle tells us, with
no loss of proportion whatsoever, that it “plumbs new depths of obnoxious
behaviour” – was part of the same episode,
the same day’s bad behaviour from Pietersen, the same day of inhibition loss
and tantrum, the same insecure defensiveness and lashing out. Exactly as he
bats, in fact.‘Man on 78-person shooting spree also fired three rounds at a passing chihuahua’ is not news.

But it is highly revealing
to see how Newman worded his defence of the article, or its provenance, on
Twitter. He dispenses the mini-lesson about “journalism” and its ‘rules’ for
thenaïf’s benefit, a self-validating statement – on the order of a “this is just
the way it is” – that thereby implicitly absolves himself of any ethical
self-reflection.* Yet before that came the killer line that I had hitherto omitted:
“I think there’s a misunderstanding on how things work. We seek out info that
we feel is newsworthy/relevant by many means”. The devil is in the detail, in the phrasing:
we feel is relevant…

Here, then, it seems clear
that the journalist is not so much documenting facts – if by that is meant writing from
some neutral vantage point, exterior to a reality that they are thus describing in a purportedly
‘objective’ manner – as constructing a story, creating an entire
ambience in which the shards of reported ‘facts’ will be received, as with the Bilbao
Guggenheim and its Rothkos and Warhols. There is always a precise approach to the works, to the words. Although they may strive for ‘neutrality’, journalists
are, like all writing, making an
intervention from a position very much immersed in reality, part of the event's feedback circuits, and thus capable
of causally affecting its outcome (even if that effect, in the case of the
KP saga, is simply influencing public perception to the point where, say, a process
of reconciliation becomes intolerable for all parties). It is, in a sense, a proof of
Heisenberg’s Principle: the position and momentum
of a particle cannot simultaneously
be accurately measured because we inevitably affect things that we’re
attempting to observe and measure. As for quantum physics, so for journalism.

Heisenberg: principled

It is a truth universally
acknowledged that the power of the media – and for its practitioners – is, or
can be, intensely libidinal. To be in
an inner circle, to be party to the secret, to be at the cutting edge of
history-in-the-making, provides an erotic frisson, a psychic reward. To pen paragraphs that take
this tone or that, sentences dripping with rancour or revenge, apathy or
aloofness, unleashes a voluptuous wave. Sade and Sacher-Masoch knew about this
omnipresence of desire. The Nuremberg Rallies; doing the accounts; the Last
Night of the Proms; the man in the dole office assiduously checking your
Jobsearch; the stroll down the St John’s Wood Road, resplendent in one’s
egg-and-bacon suit – entirely sexual.

The distinction to be made
when weighing journalistic interventions, then, is not about ‘objective’ or
‘subjective’ (no one knows all the ‘facts’ to be objective; no one writes free
enough of institutional constraints to be subjective) but simply to follow the
course of actions – actions perhaps with conscious motives;
actions maybe having unconscious causes; actions with extraneous reasons; but actions always
with repercussions... Is the pursuit of anecdotal evidence deemed “newsworthy” or
“relevant” really free of any personal agenda, an axe to grind? Is the journalist truly allowing,
as much as possible, the situation to follow its own internal course, free of
interference, or is her line stoking the fires, itself stoked by a commercial
logic (that of the paper) masquerading as news, as truth?

“You can normally spot
when one of these [feeding frenzies] reaches its denouement,” Johnson avers,
“since it almost inevitably triggers a surge of self-loathing that washes
through the entire commentariat”. We may be having a breather with KP, but I’m not entirely sure we are there
just yet.

* The
probable truth is that Mr Newman’s employer demands that type of story and he –
like all of us, playing within the true rules of the game: those of capitalism –
has most likely internalized any conscientious objection and dutifully carries
out his work according to the desires of his employers. Their desires become his will.
At least, that is the most charitable explanation, aside from having his copy tweaked
by subs to fit the DM agenda.